In Matthew Richards’ chilling short film The Disappearance of Willie Bingham, a man becomes the first subject of a radical new justice system known as Progressive Amputation – a disturbing exploration of what happens when the concept of ‘an eye for an eye’ is pushed to its most extreme conclusion.

Since its release on our YouTube channel in 2017, the film has continued to ignite conversation, resonating with audiences around the world. In this latest edition of our Short Films Explained series we invited director Richards to join us and discuss how a popular Metallica song inspired the narrative, why he thinks it resonates with so many people, and some of the other thought-provoking questions raised by our YouTube community.

For those who’d rather read the interview, here’s the edited transcript:

All these questions are inspired by the comments section of our YouTube upload of The Disappearance of Willie Bingham and one of the common threads in those discussions revolves around the of meaning behind your film. Personally I think it’s really good for films to be open to interpretation but I was wondering what was the inspiration behind this story? What made you want to bring this particular story to the screen? 

There was a really influential Metallica song years and years ago – Landmine has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing – I heard that when I was 15 and that really stuck with me, that feeling of the helplessness of being trapped within a system, being kept alive against your will.

When I connected with an American writer who was writing short stories, he had the original short story forThe Disappearance of Willie Bingham and we developed it out of that. I was struck by his black satirical tone and how he was unafraid to just go right in there.

It was a moral puzzle for an audience to fall into and see how they feel and I wanted to try to make them squirm a little bit.

You definitely make them squirm, that’s for sure!

Again, going through the YouTube comments, there’s a lot of discussions around how to feel about what they’re watching and the film very much focuses on the punishment of Willie, instead of the crime he’s committed. Did you ever think of telling the story in another way.

I was asked to do that subsequently, after the film was finished. Someone else wanted to tell the story from the other point of view, where we see a lot more of what went on before his punishment, but it was less interesting to me.

I wanted the focus to be on what it’s like going through a system that you have no control over. But I’m just putting enough information in there to tell you that yes, he is guilty, but we don’t want to focus on that too much.

We wanted to focus on the system and the dehumanization that happens within such a system. I’m asking you to question your humanity when when you watch the film. It’s not about feeling sorry for him. It’s about what is humanity, our sense of that and how far are we willing to go to enact justice in a system that’s so barbaric it eventually destroys everyone who’s connected to it.

For me, a lot of the impact in The Disappearance of Willie Bingham comes from watching the victim’s family throughout the punishment. A lot of our commenters have mentioned how well you handled the deterioration of the father, in particular. So can you talk a little about your decision making around this aspect.

I wanted to show the impact on the surgeon. I wanted to show the impact on the nurse who’s looking after him.

With the daughters dropping out of witnessing the procedure, I wanted to focus on the idea versus the reality. On paper they sign off on the punishment thinking: “Okay, great, I’m gonna get vengeance here, I’m gonna feel justice is served.”

But the father’s just not getting it. He’s been told by this system that he’s going to get it, but it’s costing him everything and he’s still not satisfied.

The parallels between what happens to Willie and what happens to the father – both of them disappearing over the length of the film – is really striking. It feels like you go through a real journey in such a short time.

I tried to do that with the supervisor as well, and I don’t think I quite nailed it with him. I was trying to explore this idea of someone just “doing their job” and how the system screws him over as well. He’s a bureaucrat, he’s maintaining arms distance.

One of the other aspects that the YouTube audience is really interested in is the visual transformation of Willie. We go from seeing a complete man at the start of the film, to seeing a man literally torn apart by this procedure. A lot of people are commenting that you make it look and feel so realistic, so can we ask about how you managed to do that?

It’s interesting, because in the original short story, at the end of it, he’s just two eyeballs in a little box. But I thought, “I can’t, no, I can’t do that.”  I wanted to ground it in reality more than that.

The visual effects person that I had on board for all of the pre-production stuff pulled out the day before the shoot. So I ended up having to do VFX supervising myself, which forced me to change my tact and think more about “what do I know that I can get away with if I can’t find someone else to do it.”

So it came down to less is more. Originally, I was trying to do as much as I could practically. We actually had an amputee come onto set, but I just couldn’t get the arm in the right position to make it look like it was Willie’s arm – we ended up just using that as a reference for lighting.

It was like that old Hitchcockian thing where you think about what’s more horrific to see: the actual car accident or the sound of the brakes. Where does the horror play out? I’ve always been interested in psychological horror from that kind of point of view.

I think you got the balance perfectly right – although I would have really liked to see how you managed to pull the ending off when it was just eyeballs in a box.

Final question and this is a common one with any of our YouTube uploads that prove popular, as a lot of people who watch short films always want more from a story. This is definitely the case with The Disappearance of Willie Bingham – have you ever thought about expanding the story? Were there any discussions around the possibility? 

There were discussions. However, I just felt like the strength of this idea was in its compact nature and to extrapolate that, I think it would lose some power. 

It’s interesting to hear you say that, as I spoke to Tim Egan, who directed the film Curve – another film that’s done really well on YouTube – and he said something very similar. Where there were talks to develop his film, but he felt like the stories power lay in how contained it was.

I think, with The Disappearance of Willie Bingham, what you’d end up doing is just having these really long scenes of the whole prep of him going into the surgery. When we originally wrote the script there was a lot more dialogue in there and a lot of the bleak trajectory the final short takes really comes down to my editor.

It’s really nice when you’re working with talented people and they bring their thing to the plate. As a director, you obviously have a strong idea of how you want your film to turn out, but it’s important to be open enough to realise when people are really good at what they and let them have an input.

For me, that’s one of the great things about short film as well, there’s freedom there that you don’t probably have on bigger projects or more commercial projects. You can take something and play with it a bit more and I think for everyone involved in a short film, it’s a chance to show-off your craft.

On that note, thanks for joining us Matt and for giving up your time.

Thanks so much.